Endgame by Frank Brady Read Free Book Online

the fourth grade, he’d been in and out of six schools—almost two a year—leaving each time because he wasn’t doing well in his studies or couldn’t abide his teachers, classmates, or even the school’s location.In frustration, Regina registered Bobby in a school for gifted children. He lasted one day and refused to go back.
    Eventually, she found a school that was an appropriate match for her problematic son.In the fall of 1952, when Bobby was nine, Regina secured scholarship enrollment for him in Brooklyn Community Woodward, a progressive grade school of approximately 150 children. Housed in a stately brownstone that had originally been a private home, it was one of the loveliest school buildings in Brooklyn.The school’s philosophy of education was based on the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, an eighteenth-century Swiss educator who opposed memorization exercises and strict discipline, and concentrated on the individual’s development though a series of experimental techniques. The school promoted the concept of
Anschaung
, a personal way of looking at things that was inherent and individual to every child. The seats and desks weren’t permanently fixed in place as they were in most schools, and the children were encouraged to forget the distinction between study and play.To learn early American history, for example, students dressed in costumes of the era and were taught how to spin yarn, hook rugs, and use quill pens.
    Bobby’s way was chess, and what it meant to him. He was already showing talent for the game, and he was accepted by Community Woodward with the understanding that he’d teach the other students to play, and also as a result of his astronomically high IQ test score of 180.
    A bright spot in his social and physical development at CommunityWoodward occurred when he was chosen to be on the baseball team, and he began to emerge from his shell. He fell in love with the game, could hear the roar of the crowds from nearby Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, while at school or at home, and on class trips attended games at the stadium. He had a knack for fielding and batting, but although he was fast, he wasn’t a particularly coordinated runner on the bases. “He incited a great deal of interest in chess here,” one of his teachers said later. “He easily beat everybody, including the chess-playing members of the faculty. No matter what he played, whether it was baseball in the yard, or tennis, he had to come out ahead of everybody.If he’d been born next to a swimming pool he would have been a swimming champion. It just turned out to be chess.”

    One day Bobby bounded up the three flights of stairs to the safety of his home, only to find it empty. Joan was still in school, staying late for the Biology Club; Regina was in a nursing class, to be followed by library work and then a night shift after that. He found a note, penned in a small, blue spiral-bound pad, propped up on a chair in the kitchen:
    Dear Bobby—Finish off the soup and rice. Milk in refrig. I may get back after 3 to drop off groceries, and will then go back to study. Love, M
.
    Being alone in the apartment was the default position of Bobby’s life from the time that Regina felt her son could be left by himself without supervision, and this persistent solitude might well have been a catalyst for his deeper involvement in chess. As he sat in front of the chessboard, often at the kitchen table, with a chess book spread open, the pieces became his companions, the book his mentor. Neither the loneliness nor the learning was easy for him, however. He would have liked to have had a friend, some other boy that he could play and share adventures with, but since chess was already occupying most of his time, interest, and thoughts,that potential friend would have had to not only know how to play chess but play it well enough to engage Bobby’s attention and loyalty.
    A certain compulsion forced him to continue to